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Comment by CobrastanJorji | Hacker News Reader

Tangentially related, but has anyone else noticed a big increase in fraud attempts over the last year or two? I hardly remember any a while back, but I've gotten probably a dozen calls this year that go "hey this is AmEx please confirm your credit card number" or some such.

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It's partially a product of the widespread availability of LLMs. Criminal organizations that would previously have been limited by the language fluency, scale, or technical competence of the labor available to them can now use LLMs to supplement their operations. It's also helping them target new populations that you're more likely to be in alongside traditional victims like the elderly, the desperate, previous victims, etc. They're pretty slow to adopt new technologies, so scam usage is still ramping up.

Phone call scams seem to ebb and flow depending on which 'sucker lists' you're on. Online scams appear to be persistently on the rise, both against consumers and organizations (businesses, non-profits, and governments). I suspect that LLM-AI will be a boon for scammers of all sorts, but particularly for phone and video-call scammers.

Every now and then I hear advice to the effect that saying even a single word to a robocaller will get your number flagged for more, so you should just answer silently and hang-up. Whenever I follow that advice, I get more and more calls. Then I start engaging with callers to waste their time and resources. I press numbers, try to get to speak to a human, and then generally mess with them if I do get a human. That usually takes care of the calls for a while.

My credit card number is 1234 5678 abcd efgh.

What do you mean it has to be numbers? I can read it right here, it says abcd efgh.

Mine is actually all letters, it's G U L L I B L E. If you're having trouble remembering, I heard it's written on your ceiling right above you.

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